The historic nuclear deal with Iran: How it works

The deal's proponents argue that the talks have yielded the best guarantee possible that Iran won't be able to move toward nuclear weapons, while also, for the time being, reducing the risk of yet another military escalation in the Middle East.
"This deal offers an opportunity to move in a new direction. We should seize it," President Obama said Tuesday.
Here's a guide to how it works.

John Oliver explains how billions of taxpayer dollars are wasted on professional sports stadiums

Owners of football teams currently in St. Louis, San Diego, and Oakland are angling to make a move to Los Angeles, and they're leveraging the potential departure locally for taxpayer support of new or improved stadiums in their current municipalities. As Oliver makes clear, this strategy often leads to the comically vile scenario in which billionaires demand that cities provide hundreds of millions of dollars to appease privately owned teams that charge many of those same taxpayers hundreds of dollars for tickets.

Senate bill would make social media report 'terrorist activity'

Social media operators such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube would have to notify federal authorities of online "terrorist activity," according to the text of a bill approved by the Senate Intelligence Committee and seen by Reuters on Wednesday.
The types of communication include postings related to "explosives, destructive devices, and weapons of mass destruction," according to the text. An official familiar with the bill said it was sent to the Senate floor for a vote.
The official said its main purpose was to give social media companies additional legal protection if they reported to the authorities on traffic circulated by their users, rather than coerce them to spy on users.

Why do women outlive men? Science zeroes in on answer

According to this study, since the introduction of antibiotics and modern hygiene infrastructure, it's mostly about habits:

In the first part of the 20th century, smoking was much more common among men than women, Beltran-Sanchez said.
By looking at data from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the team saw that the gender gap in life expectancy really opened up when people started eating more animal fats, a shift that began in adults born at the end of the 19th century in most of the countries researchers examined. Other studies suggest that men born between 1950 and 1985 eat more animal products than women do, the researchers noted.

A Mismatch Between Need and Affluence: American communities with high standards of living often have low charitable giving rates

It’s a common combination across the country: Residents of areas with high standards of living, low poverty, and low crime give less to charity than those in less well off areas.
That’s one finding from new data, compiled by The Chronicle of Philanthropy, combining giving behavior with quality-of-life measurements for 2,670 counties across the United States. It's based on data from The Chronicle’How America Gives study, which shows the share of income Americans in different parts of the country have donated and the Opportunity Index, created by two antipoverty nonprofits, which assigns scores of socioeconomic well-being to counties based on measurements such as housing costs, preschool attendance, Internet access, and percent of residents with advanced degrees.
The inverse relationship between opportunity and giving is "a compelling, counterintuitive finding" that pushes against our assumptions that "places with higher scores would have higher rates of giving," said Russell Krumnow, managing director of Opportunity Nation, one of the nonprofits behind the Opportunity Index. "We really need everyone’s hands in this work, and the work of expanding opportunity is everyone’s."

The politics of China’s stock market collapse

So while every international affairs pundit and their mother are focused on the travails of an economy the size of Louisiana, the second-largest economy is experiencing a teeny-weentsy stock market meltdown. From Bloomberg:
Almost 200 stocks halted trading after the close on Monday, bringing the total number of suspensions to 745, or 26 percent of listed firms on mainland exchanges, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Most of the halts are by companies listed in Shenzhen, which is dominated by smaller businesses.
The suspensions have locked up $1.4 trillion of shares, or 21 percent of China’s market capitalization, and are becoming increasingly popular as equity prices tumble. If not for the halts, a 28 percent plunge in the Shanghai Composite Index from its June 12 peak would probably be even deeper….
The rout in Chinese shares has erased at least $3.2 trillion in value, or twice the size of India’s entire stock market
...
This doesn’t necessarily mean that financial contagion will infect China’s real economy. Chinese equity markets are pretty thin and small as a percentage of GDP compared to the developed world. Less than 20 percent of household assets were in the stock market. Financially, it would be difficult to argue that this is China’s Lehman moment.
...
The hard-working staff here at Spoiler Alerts will leave it to the Chinese economic experts to hash out that debate. The one thing that these analysts and everyone else agrees upon is that this will put a serious dent into Xi Jinping’s efforts to liberalize the Chinese economy on issues ranging from capital account liberalization to simply letting the market play a ‘decisive’ rolein the economy.